Charts the flight of some of this century's most important thinkers from Nazi Germany to the United States. Jay explores the theories of The Frankfurt School -- among them, the work of Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse -- as well, such as George Lichtheim, Hannah Arendt, and Henry Pachter.

"Discusses whether exiles and expatriates have made a distinctive contribution to knowledge"--Provided by the publisher.

The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world. Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.

"Modernity as exile tackles the themes of migration, displacement, and multiculturalism in the modern world." "Throughout John Berger's writings, whether an art, literature or sociology, the figure of the stranger signals both the pain of uprooting and the insight gained from 'another way of seeing'." "Nikos Papastergiadis uses this figure to argue that 'exile' is not merely a political or social fact, but is an inner condition, central to the postmodern self. He analyses the cultural dynamics that connect migration and exile, not simply as the negative consequence of contemporary culture, but as its fundamental driving force. Peoples are displaced not only by wars and famine but by economics, tourism, global telecommunications. How this explodes our notions of home, of community and our sense of belonging is the central question addressed by this provocative and powerful book."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of - and perhaps even practical betterment - of our increasingly troubled world.

The history of American universities is punctuated by shifts in the terms on which the mission of higher education is defined and debated. A dramatic moment with lasting effects came with the introduction of German-speaking exile intellectuals in the Hitler era. In Germany, the academic culture of the early twentieth century was torn by the struggle between Wissenschaft and Bildung, two symbolic German terms, whose lack of precise English equivalents is a sign of the different configuration in America. The studies in this book examine the achievements of numerous influential émigré intellectuals against the background of their mediation between the two cultural traditions in science and liberal studies. In showing the richness of reciprocal influences, the book challenges claims about the disruptive influence of exile culture on the American mind.

Until recently, discussion of ‘creativity in exile’ has focussed almost exclusively on a few European male writers, from Dante to Joseph Brodsky, who sought refuge abroad from political oppression. This volume, with accompanying 100-minute DVD, ranges much more widely, to examine the extraordinary creative endeavours in a range of media of men and women in almost every part of the world who, for a host of different reasons, have experienced displacement from their homelands. It brings together papers by academics, many of whom have experienced exile themselves, on topics as diverse as: the visual arts in Colombia, fiction by displaced indigenous peoples, convicts and slaves as exiles, writings about the partition of Bengal, the culture of Palestinian Americans, philosophers on exile, and the significance of cooking to refugee communities, which are interspersed with poems by contemporary writers in exile. The use of the DVD format has permitted the inclusion of: studio interviews with notable exiled writers from Nigeria, Cyprus and Bulgaria, extracts from two films relating to exile, a live reading of his work by an Iraqi poet, an audio and sculptural installation by a First Nations Canadian artist, and a performance by musicians in exile from Burundi.

Elilal, exile, is the condition of thousands of Mayas who have fled their homelands in Guatemala to escape repression and even death at the hands of their government. In this book, Victor Montejo, who is both a Maya expatriate and an anthropologist, gives voice to those who until now have struggled in silence--but who nevertheless have found ways to reaffirm and celebrate their Mayaness. Voices from Exile is the authentic story of one group of Mayas from the Kuchumatan highlands who fled into Mexico and sought refuge there. Montejo's combination of autobiography, history, political analysis, and testimonial narrative offers a profound exploration of state terror and its inescapable human cost.